Due to the sharp rise in the price of iron in recent years, gatherers of metal scraps have become a familiar component of Tel Aviv's urban landscape – an inseparable part of the unofficial shadow economy that exists alongside the world of metropolitan commerce. Always in motion, they can be seen pushing shopping carts filled with metal pieces, which form ephemeral collections of sorts. The rapid accumulation and dissolution of these caches of metal, moreover, may be likened to the lives of collections accumulated over a period of many years.